So Since Everyone's Weighing In... Here's My Two Cents on DeepSeek!

The #NASDAQ stock market took a serious hit yesterday, largely due to the announcement of DeepSeek (a Chinese language model rivaling OpenAI and others), which demonstrated that similar results can be achieved at a dramatically lower cost.

Fewer Chips, Same Results

This language model uses fewer high-performance chips to reach the same result, shaking investor confidence in #NVIDIA stock and others (who, at the end of the day, don't understand the technology all that well).

Yann LeCun's Take

Yann LeCun said: "To people who see DeepSeek's performance and think China is surpassing the US, you're reading it wrong. The correct reading is: open source models are surpassing proprietary models."

In short, you really can use a fraction of the computing power to get the same results, thanks to the progress made by open source work.

A Balanced Take

Do you think Western companies and governments will trust an LLM coming out of China (compare that to TikTok, blocked in the US pending a potential forced sale)?

On the other hand, their work (being open source) will help the community steer development toward other approaches that use fewer resources (a win for the planet).

Do you think we'll suddenly no longer need computing power?

Beyond video games, bitcoin mining, and AI, rest assured we'll find plenty of uses for ever more powerful chips (NVIDIA or otherwise): modeling for space exploration, simulating physical, quantum, and cosmic phenomena, and so on.

My Take

Personally, I'm not worried about NVIDIA's stock price or the NASDAQ index.

You read this panic everywhere, especially on LinkedIn, about the US tech market. Maybe, maybe, maybe… let's wait and see the American response (Stargate among others, even though the funding raises questions, with Elon Musk's initiatives, etc.).

And then DeepSeek got hit with cyberattacks afterward. Strange, isn't it?